• Chicago Mayor Richard Daley surprisingly announced he won’t run for re-election. White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, long rumored to be on his way out after the midterms, has said he would like the job someday. You do the math. [The Caucus]

• Credit where it’s due: The Anti-Defamation League initiated and is sponsoring the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to provide support to Muslim communities facing local opposition to proposed mosques. [ADL]

• As 5771 dawns, Israel’s population grew to more than 7.6 million—nearly 5.8 million of which are Jews. [JTA]

• Our very own Liel Leibovitz and Todd Gitlin—co-writers of the forthcoming The Chosen Peoples—argue that Israelis and Palestinians should seek to understand each other’s religious and historical investments in the land they share. [LAT]

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The only surprise regarding Fidel Castro lecturing Ahmadinejad and, by extension, the Arab world and, yes, the EU and USA regarding their contribution to the Holocaust and attendant Jewish insecurity, in Israel and the in the Diaspora, is how long it took us to find someone to ask the question!

Despite the bad press in the US, the generations of political enmity into the present towards the overthrow of America’s corrupt puppet Batista, and the attendant loss of control over the island-colony Cuba; isolated by the US embargo the tiny and poor island republic still has been able to provide its people universal health care, something the haves in the US are still defending as a privilege to be withheld from those who cannot afford it. Cuba is in the forefront of exporting physicians and teachers to underdeveloped countries, not war matériel, humanitarian aid in times of emergency. One of the poorest countries in the hemisphere is still likely the region’s most generous.

So is it a surprise that the leader who brought his country to the avant-garde of humanism would fail to, at heart, although critic of Israeli policies with which he disagrees, not appreciate that our history of persecution most recently resulting in extermination has resulted in Israel/Diaspora-Jewish insecurity?

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